In this week’s episode of The CEO Warrior Podcast, Mike Agugliaro interviews Ari Meisel, who has developed the Less Doing More Living system of productivity, which teaches people to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in order to be more effective. During this episode, Mike and Ari discuss Crohn’s disease, the 9 fundamentals of Less Doing, best email practices, road blocks, and using a virtual assistant.

Main Questions Asked:

How do you get started on Less Doing?

What other hacks have you discovered?

What technology is causing people problems or deficiencies?

What are your tips and tricks for email best practices?

What are the biggest roadblocks you see when it comes to your students?

Key Lessons Learned:

People seem to be driven to be busy for no other reason than to be busy.

Work expands to the time allotted to complete it. If you have an hour, it will take an hour. If you have 30 minutes, it will take 30 minutes.

There is a gap between the level in which we have evolved biologically as humans and the level we have evolved technologically.

It is completely unreasonable for people to think that they can keep up with things happening in modern life, which leads to the feeling of being overwhelmed.

Technology amplifies habits. If you have good habits, technology will make them better; if you have bad habits, technology will make them significantly worse.

9 Fundamentals of Less Doing

80/20 Rule

This is about tracking and identifying what you are doing with your time, resources, energy, and money.

Tracking provides useful information, even if you don’t do anything about it, because awareness alone has been shown to have an impact.

Track the number of steps you take, food intake, and online usage.

Creating an External Brain

Using a program such as Evernote frees up your brain space from holding onto ideas and allows for more creation.

Customization

Products made for everyone aren’t necessarily made for every one.

Where most people see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunities.

You can create custom solutions to your problems a lot more easily than you think!

Choose Your Own Workweek

Learn when and where you do things best, and organize your life around that.

Stop Running Errands

This is more consumer-based and involves systematizing things to happen for you.

Doing errands yourself is small thinking. Even if you could have done it quicker, it’s a transferable skill at which people get better at over time. Your time is worth more than that of someone you could hire.

Batching

Stop yourself from multitasking, which is really simply the exhausting practice of context switching.

Batching is focusing on one task at a time and grouping together similar activities.

Batching helps gain a personal economy of scale.

The only way to multitask is to combine a low-focus task with a high-focus task.

Organization

Set an artificial limit on yourself and work backwards.

In order to reduce your book inventory, you can scan them and place in Evernote.

Finances

This is about tracking and figuring out where you spend your money

There is also information about creating knowledge products and creating passive income.

Wellness

No matter how technologically or procedurally advanced you are, if you aren’t sleeping or eating well and are too stressed, then you won’t be effective.

Wear blue blocking sunglasses one hour before you go to bed.

Avoid keeping your cell phone in your bedroom when you go to sleep.

Email Best Practices

Approach email once in one of three ways:

Delete it.

Deal with it.

Defer it.

Road Blocks

Entrepreneurs often have an incorrect mindset where they believe they have to do things themselves and that they have a unique talent that nobody else can do.

Human beings have trouble letting go, but the truth is that this is the only way to grow.

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